My dad had just picked me up from night studies in the law library when we heard the screams. A chunky boy raced past, shirt tail flying, crying. I held out my arms but he pushed past and ran through. Then I heard shouting, yelping and laughing, and three young men flew past in pursuit. My dad just said, come on, and I said, what was that, and he said, we're going to the police.
I didn't know then what a beat was until we got to the station, a couple of blocks away, nor why, when I told the sergeant what we had just seen and that I thought someone might get killed, he didn't get excited or even out of his chair: until, that is, my dad said, aren't you going to do anything? And he said, drily, I've made a note.
This was my first experience of gay-bashing, and of the unofficial law-enforcement view of it.
Homosexuality was illegal then, but murder was, too.
In 1997 a Queensland man successfully defeated wilful murder charges after a 'touch' from a gay man supposedly 'provoked' him into ramming his head into a pulp, then stabbing him. 'Yeah, I killed the guy,' he told police, 'but what he did to me was worse.'
When John Rusk was beaten to death in a Maryborough Catholic church's grounds in 2008 the men charged with his murder successfully pleaded that they had been provoked into it, because the victim (a drinking companion) made a homosexual suggestion. They were convicted of manslaughter rather than murder.
On 12 January this year the then Queensland Attorney General said he would change the law so 'gay panic' couldn't be raised again in like circumstances, as an expert committee recommended. A week ago, the new Attorney General Jarrod Bleiijie said that his (Campbell Newman) government wouldn't be changing it after all.
Homosexual men and women perceive, as do law reform bodies around the world, that legitimating a specific form of sexual-advance as 'provocation' creates a social climate in which 73 per cent of gay and lesbian Queenslanders say they have been subjected to physical violence and verbal abuse because of their sexuality.
This 'gay panic' defence is one particularly revolting aspect of how the law works in those few states which have not abolished this loophole in the law protecting the sanctity of life.
Provocation is a component of the criminal codes of both